I wonder if any of our members has read Robert Langs’ most recent book, Freud on a Precipice. How Freud’s Fate pushed Psychoanalysis over the Edge? While most Jungians seem familiar with Langs’ earlier work on derivative communication, communication styles, and the importance of the analytic frame, I have only met a few familiar with Langs’ work of the last decade. I have just reviewed Freud on a Precipice in the most recent issue of the Journal of Analytical Psychology (vol. 57, no. 1, 127-8) and the book strikes me as a good introduction to Langs’ current research.
Key to Langs’ recent work is how death anxiety and death-related trauma are the most basic factors in all psychic conflict and distress. Langs considers death anxiety to be so potent a force in psychic conflict that he claims: (1) it is archetypal, in Jung’s sense; (2) we therefore always experience death anxiety on some level and (3) evolution has conferred upon us a psychic factor whereby we deny this anxiety, lest we be overwhelmed by it. Thus it appears – if I understand Langs correctly – that some amount of psychic conflict is more or less inevitable, because we need to face death-related traumas and anxieties in order to gain psychic health yet we are simultaneously battling an ingrained, evolutionary mechanism tending us to deny it.
These ideas enter into the Freud book, in that Langs postulates that current psychoanalytic practice and theory in essence “acts out” this psychic situation by denying the centrality of death anxiety, something which Langs seeks to prove happened in Freud’s own case and which continues, he thinks, throughout the psychoanalytic tradition. How plausible do you all think it is that death-related traumas and anxieties lie at the root of psychic conflict? Does anyone find parallels to Langs’ claims in the Jungian tradition? Are there signs of the denial of death-related anxieties and traumas in the Jungian tradition?
Some related texts:
Langs, Robert. 2010. Freud on a Precipice. How Freud’s Fate pushed Psychoanalysis over the Edge. Lanham MD: Jason Aronson
Langs, Robert. 2004. “Death anxiety and the emotion-processing mind”. Psychoanalytic Psychology. Vol. 21, no. 1, 31-53
Replies
Ditto, Bonnie. My own circuitous history: I was accepted here in Emory University's doctoral program. Like most academic institutions, Emory's faculty reviles Jung and worships Freud. They wanted me to do an interdisciplinary program that would have required exams in multiple departments. It sounded like a battle. So I enrolled at Pacifica because of my obsession with the work of Jung and James Hillman.
After my course work, as I began my dissertation research, I suddenly fell into fascination with Freud and Lacan's work, and that's about all I read for the next year. (I don't recommend Lacan unless you want to make yourself feel really stupid.) I'm not sure if Pacifica could really do more in this area, but I don't think I had any classes in Freud at all there. I'm glad to hear they've added some.
BTW--for any members of the depth community following this thread but who haven't engaged yet--please add your voice! And for easy reference, here is the web site for Dr. Robert Langs so you know more about him if you don't already....http://members.authorsguild.net/rlangs1/ I think it's helpful to have a better feel for the person whose ideas we're discussing.....
Thanks for your comments Bonnie and David. I have been attempting in some feeble way to keep up with neuroscience developments as well, Bonnie, and it may well be that the brain reflects the things that Langs is saying about the mind/psyche. I did not know about Von Franz' book, David, so I really appreciate the reference to it. I found some articles of Jung that seemed potentially to confirm what Langs is saying or at least to complement some of it ("The stages of life" and "The soul and death," CW 8) but I would have to work through both them and Langs' work more to see to what extent they correlate.
I don't know how much you all know about Langs' work on the therapeutic frame, but he wrote a good deal about its significance and did so for many years. One reason for that is that Langs' has a first-rate ear for derivatives and has in many publications given examples of how to listen for them. Langs found through listening carefully to derivatives, not only in his own work but also in his supervision of others, that violations of the frame are among the most important mistakes that therapists make. I would think Jung's alchemical vision of the analytical relationship would confirm this approach.
One of the things I find interesting about Langs' new developments is that he seems to be getting to the bottom of why these issues of the frame are so important. In essence -- if I understand Langs correctly -- resistance to boundaries, both in therapy and in life, is in part a resistance to the ultimate boundary we have, death. The archetypal impact of death is something that Langs finds in all kinds of boundary issues and, in my relatively limited experience, this seems to me confirmed, insofar as resistance to boundaries is often accompanied with signs -- in derivatives, dreams, etc, -- that death anxiety is lurking underneath.
Langs more recent work also differentiates the "superficial" versus the "deep" unconscious -- something which may also find indirect confirmation in the triune brain you talk about Bonnie. The deep unconscious, according to Langs, follows a different sort of logic and a different sort of ethic from our conscious mind. In particular, violations of frame and death anxieties become lodged there and percolate upwards, so to speak, in the images, dreams, fantasies we have.
Langs developed a rich clinical approach to these issues over the years, what he terms "trigger decoding". If you read about it, it sounds as if, in a session, he basically works almost exclusively with dreams or what he terms "origination narratives," which seems to amount to an on-the-spot made-up narrative, where the client simply offers a story. Then the client derives associations especially to the themes of the dream or narrative. Then, out of the pool of the themes, Langs relates them to the emotionally charged events of the client's life interpretively. There may be a lot of my fantasy in describing what he does that way, because I have never heard him speak directly about it but only read about it. But it is also what he does in the Freud book, i.e. he trigger decodes Freud's psyche, so to speak, by looking at the letters and texts he wrote as well as his history, linking up both conscious statements and derivatives, in an attempt to see what was underlying Freud's move toward his structural theory and away from the topographical theory, which Langs considers far more powerful and to the point. To my mind, the book is really the work of a master analyst and quite an achievement.
Thanks again. I'd love to keep the discussion going. I have learned a lot from your reactions and it has gotten me thinking about a lot of things
My understanding is that Jung came to the conclusion that the deep psyche is not very concerned with death, that it even tends to ignore it. This is derived from his study of people's dreams as they approach death. Jung's "fear" that his doctor would need to die in his stead seemed to me to be more about survivor guilt than fear.
Jung's most well known student Marie-Louise von Franz wrote an interesting book called 'On Dreams and Death'. It seemed to me not to shy away from the confrontation with death but to be nevertheless very reassuring in that it examines the dreams of those in the dying process and points to the existence of an eternal realm of psyche totally unconcerned with death. I prefer to believe this whilst being fully aware as Jung was that it may be untrue but good for me just like salt is good for my body in ways i can't fathom.
Hi John. Thanks so much for this thoughtful and thought-provoking post. For many of us, I imagine, even thinking about the subject of death creates some latent anxiety which I tap into if I pay attention. And, because death is archetypal and requires no explanation to understand the concept, I have no doubt that our fears around it as the ultimate terminal event in life drives many of our unconscious decisions.
I don't pretend to know much about it, but I do know that neuroscience, which is a growing field due to our increasing ability to scan our brains and see what's going on inside, tells us the primitive or oldest part of our triune (3-part) brain is in a constant state of readiness to make decisions and act based on any danger that is life-threatening. It's the part of the brain responsible for fight or flight. At the same time, our brains make dopamine which is a neurotransmitter sometimes called a "reward chemical" that seems to be always seeking expansion, connecting more to the idea of transformation and individuation most commonly encountered in Jungian psychotherapy. Your comments--and Dr. Langs' ideas--do make me wonder though if dopamine might be part of an evolutionary scheme to combat the threat of death anxiety that may well lie at the root of our human experience.
I also wonder what happens to "death-anxiety" for people who have "postivie" near-death experiences, as Jung himself did. Jung describes his experience and makes reference to not wanting to return to life but to remain instead with people in his vision during death because he "belonged" with them. However, paradoxically, Jung goes on to say he "feared" his doctor would have to die in his stead because he is the one who made Jung come back... ( Read Jung's account here )--so it seems his general anxiety about death for others at least did not abate. Does anyone else know anything about this?--or what do you think?
-
1
-
2
-
3
of 3 Next